Tim Blair

So, el Cid of Tizona's Weblog pointed me toward Tim Blair today. Right on the first page, six posts down from the top......I fell in love! Currently, comments registration is closed so I couldn't tell him there, but I can tell him here, lol.

What has my heart aflutter? Why, it's a good story about my bad boyfriend! It was in a funny post.

If you follow the link in the post it takes you to this story by Dean Barnett.

Plagiarism!
The sloppy hackery of the left.
by Dean Barnett

03/29/2008 12:00:00 AM
LAST THURSDAY, A controversy erupted in the blogosphere. Like most controversies that start in the blogosphere and die there as opposed to gaining a second and more meaningful life in the mainstream media, the entire affair was a tempest in a virtual teapot. But this incident was a particularly pregnant one, as it revealed the difficulties the left will have in developing a coherent attack against John McCain. It also highlighted Barack Obama's most significant weakness in a match against Senator McCain.
In a campaign address to the Los Angeles World Council, McCain made a point of stressing his hatred for war:

I detest war. It might not be the worst thing to befall human beings, but it is
wretched beyond all description. When nations seek to resolve their differences
by force of arms, a million tragedies ensue. The lives of a nation's finest
patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer and die. Commerce is disrupted;
economies are damaged; strategic interests shielded by years of patient
statecraft are endangered as the exigencies of war and diplomacy conflict. Not
the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can
glorify war. Whatever gains are secured, it is loss the veteran remembers most
keenly.

The statement is eloquent and powerful, but given the speaker, unremarkable. There are few people in America who can speak so personally to their dislike for war than a fellow who spent a half decade in the Hanoi Hilton. If there's anyone in this presidential race who has cause for hating war, it's obviously John McCain. Compared to McCain's personal experience, Barack Obama's exposure to war is a mere intellectual construct. Even Hillary Clinton, the Lioness of Tuzla, can't compete with McCain in this area.
For reasons that still mystify, men of the left decided that McCain's denunciation of war represented a soft spot. The bumbling gumshoes at the lefty website Think Progress got busy investigating McCain's speech and discovered that Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer had given a speech featuring remarkably similar language in 1996. "Plagiarism!" the left wing blogosphere cried, nearly in unison.

I don't need to read the rest to know this is untterly ridiculous, but here's the actual truth.

Without leaving you in any further suspense as to how the brouhaha ended, suffice to say McCain's critics beclowned themselves in the extreme. Turns out Admiral Ziemer's 1996 speech borrowed from a speech that McCain gave in 1995. The fact that the McCain campaign had posted the 1995 speech on its website should compound his critics' embarrassment. The additional fact that no one at Think Progress contacted the McCain campaign or even checked the Senator's website before charging "Plagiarism!" will likely cause professional writers to think twice before citing a Think Progress report in the future.

Jesus wept!

What ASSHAT thinks that John McCain needs crib notes to speak about war?